Thursday, August 28, 2014

Kate Bush is very... unlikely. A teen prodigy, sherocketed to the pinnacle of the British charts with her 1978debut, "Wuthering Heights", a very... unlikely pop singleinspired by the Gothic/Romantic novel. Her keening,cloudbusting warble ("it's meeee, I'm Katheeeee") immediatelymarked her out as an original. Over the next few years,Bush's florid art-pop, outlandish image and lofty lyricalconcerns won her a devout cult following, while a larger massaudience was seduced by pop hits like "The Man With The ChildIn His Eyes". If her feminine glamour and the lavishloveliness of her music prompted sneers from critics (punkwas all the rage), Bush connected with the imagination ofsuburban youth, and particularly with the fantasy life ofintrospective young women. Her albums, "The Kick Inside" and"Lionheart" (both released in 1978), found a place right nextto Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' and Genesis' "TheLamb Lies Down On Broadway' in every small-town dreamer'scollection.

Kate Bush gradually whittled away her mass popularityby pursuing an increasingly experimental course, a tendencythat surfaced on 1980's 'Never for Ever' and the harrowingnuclear-Armageddon scenario of the single "Breathing", andblossomed with the extravagantly uncompromising 1982 album"The Dreaming". Bush faded from public view for a while,then returned to enjoy a second phase of pop stardom with theecstatic lyricism of singles like "Running Up That Hill"(from 1985's "The Hounds Of Love") and 'The Sensual World'(from the 1989 LP of the same title). And for the first time,Bush began to make an impression in America, hitherto ratherbaffled and bemused by her Englishness and arty-ness.

Her new LP "The Red Shoes" could be the one to break herbig over here. It's a diverse affair, almost a collection ofsingles rather than an 'album', ranging from a classic Bush-style keyboard-based ballad like "Moments Of Pleasure" to afuturistic funk-rock scorcher like "Big Stripey Lie", whichsees Bush wrenching out some feral noise-guitar. And itsurely won't hurt that she's got a raft of illustrious guestplayers on board this time, 'big names' like Eric Clapton,Jeff Beck and Prince.

"My guitarist [Alan Murphy] died a few years ago," saysBush, now in her mid-thirties but remarkably ageless. We'resitting in a North London film editing studio where she'sputting finishing touches to her directorial debut, "TheLine, The Cross, The Curve" (see side panel). "And therewere a lot of tracks I wanted guitar in and I felt a bitlost. So when I wrote a song I'd start to imagine who wouldbe the best guitarist I could possibly have. It was a bit ofgame at first! But people were so responsive. It did concernme a bit that if I wasn't using these people well, it wouldjust come across as very flash. Sometimes having someone whohas a distinctive sound doesn't always work very well inother people's music."

The subdued, desolate ballad 'And So Is Love' featuresEric Clapton and, on keyboards, Gary Brooker (ex-ProculHarum). "When I was writing that song, it took on a certainflavour. Quite empty, slightly bluesy. And I felt howwonderful it would be to have Eric to play on it. What heplayed was so beautiful, it became a question of findingother sounds that would suit the texture. I love the Hammondorgan, and I'd met Gary Brooker years ago on some charitything and I'd wanted to work with him."

Other guest players include Jeff Beck, the punk-coiffedclassical violinist Nigel Kennedy, and the Black Britishcomedian Lenny Henry, all of whom Bush describes separatelyas "a bit of a mate". Lenny Henry doesn't tell any gags,but does some rather fine soul singing on "Why Should I LoveYou"--the same song to which Prince contributes guitar,keyboards, bass and vocals, lending the track a distinctlyPaisley Park feel. Apart from obviously having some kind ofmutual admiration pact, Prince and Bush share someaffinities: hippy-dippy mystical leanings, but moreimportantly, a love of sumptuous arrangements, a delight inmolding the exquisite stuff of sound, frolicing in the studioplaypen. Prince and Bush both make records that are soluscious, tantalising and succulent, they're almost edible.

"I think he's so talented," gushes Bush. "One of the fewpeople in this business who's very prolific, but veryconsistent. Again, it was a bit of a whim, I was writingthe song and I thought 'who'd be nice to play guitar?'. Wenever actually met while doing the track, only later. Butthat appealed to my sense of humour, sending tapes back andforth."

"The Red Shoes" also sees Bush resume her periodicdelvings into non-Western ethnic music. The sprightly "EatThe Music" is the result of a recent infatuation withMadagascar's folk music. She first heard it through herbrother Paddy, who hips her to a lot of world music. (Heplays 'fujare' and Tibetan singing bowls on "Lily", anothersong on the album).

"If I hear things and think they're really great, it'shard not to be influenced. I've always had an interest intraditional music. Madagascan music is so fantasticallyjoyous. And I really wanted to do something that couldhopefully use that joy but fit it into a rock context.It was wonderful working with this Madagascan guy, JustinVall. His energy was extraordinary. Just like the music, sovery innocent and positive and sweet.

"Paddy's always listening out for traditional music. Itprobably came from my mother, who was Irish. She was alwayssurrounded by traditional music when she was a kid. When Iwas growing up people would come in and they'd just startplaying a tune. So there was always, in my early life, thisthing of music being treated as a joyous thing, part of life.Someone would pick up a fiddle and everyone else would get upand dance." Bush mourns the absence today of that festive,convivial, participatory approach to music. "It's to do withour English temperament, it's hard for us to learn to enjoyourselves. In Ireland, people just play music all the timecos they love it."

"The Red Shoes" also renews Bush's collaboration withthe Trio Bulgarka, whose Bulgarian harmony singing stems froma folk culture in which music is intertwined with the prosaictextures of everyday life. The Trio can sing songs aboutdoing the laundry and make it sound transcendental. "Well,not all of their songs are so trivial as that," says Bush."Some of the stories are really quite sad. But yes, they canmake you cry to a tune that's about making bread!"

Bush first called on the Trio's services for herlast album, "The Sensual World". Again, it was Paddy Bushwho turned her on to Bulgarian music, but it was Joe Boyd(legendary producer of The Incredible String Band and otherfolkadelic weirdos associated with Elektra, and founder ofHannibal, the pioneering world music label) who hooked her upwith the Trio, and equally important, with a translator andan arranger. "I was scared," recalls Bush. "'Cos what they dois so... profound and so ancient, and I felt naive in mymusical ability. I didn't want to involve them in some...pop song, y'know, and end up abusing their talents. They'repeople with such integrity. Such lovely people. They havesuch hard lives."

The everyday hardship of Eastern Bloc life led the TrioBulgarka to respond rather oddly to one line in "You're TheOnly One I Want". It's a song about breaking up arelationship, and Bush proclaims herself a free spirit whocan go where she pleases 'cos "I've got petrol in the car"."The Trio were most jealous, cos they have to queue for 48hours to get a gallon of gas. They had a totally differentway of looking at it!"

There's a similar soundclash of folk traditionalism andmodern studio artistry on the title track, "The Red Shoes",where acoustic textures (mandolo, whilstes, valiha) rubup against synthesisers. The effect suggests that Bush wastrying to make connections between ancient and modern ideasof dance, between the Celtic jig-and-reel and the techno-pagan rites of raving. "I was trying to get a sense ofdelirium, of something very circular and hypnotic, butbuilding and building, so that you transcend the normal.

With its dervish-whirling frenzy, the song is vaguelyevocative of the Tarantella, in which angst-racked youngItalian women would dance away the heartache, dance their wayout of their "constrictions" (as Funkadelic put it in "OneNation Under A Groove"). Dancing has sometimes had that sametrance-endent function for Bush. Earlier in her career, sheused to relate an anecdote about how, as a small child, shewould dance whenever pop music came on TV, quiteunselfconsciously. But one day, some family friends saw herand laughed, shattering her innocence, and "from that momentI stopped doing it. I think maybe I've been trying to getback there ever since".

"I remember being incredibly unselfconscious," says Bushnow, "but it wasn't that people laughed at me, so much thatthey came as an audience, and it made me self-conscious thatsuddenly I was being observed. I was only 3 or 4 and I woulddance to anything. Children all reach that point where theybecome self-conscious about things that are obviouslyextremely natural to them. and then you either never get backthere, or you spend a lot of time trying to recover it."

A yearning to recover lost innocence, to attain a stateof grace and easy connection with the world, is something ofthread running through Bush's work, from her early obsessionwith the 'eternal child' Peter Pan to the spiritual andreligious allusions that still pepper her lyrics (in the pastshe's had hit singles inspired by oddball mystics likeGurdjieff and Reich).

Although Bush is too "wary ofdoctrines" to align herself with any particular beliefsystem, she admits that she's something of a seeker. On thenew album, "The Song Of Solomon" is inspired by the famouslysensual and erotic passages from the Bible, while "Lily" isriddled with apocalyptic imagery: "unveil to us the face ofthe true Spiritual Son", ""walking in the Veil of Darkness" .The song was written as gift to its namesake, a "very dearand a wise lady" who helped Bush through a "rough time" (aveiled reference to the death of her mother Hannah, to whom'The Red Shoes' is dedicated). And it's the real Lily whorecites the song's first verse.

"She's one of those ladies who has gifts, and she's verygiving. She believes very strongly in angels, in a way I'venot really experienced before. My concept of angels comesfrom when I was a child. But the way she understands angelsis not like that at all, she sees them as very powerful,helpful forces - a bit like that film 'Wings Of Desire'. Andangels are something that are coming forward in the publicconsciousness, in films and art - don't you think?"

* * * * *

Along with her "wispy" mystical leanings, if there's onething that makes Bush a love-or-hate, adore-or-abhorproposition, it's her voice. For some it's swoonily intense,a voice to drown in; for others, it's gratingly over-the-top,frilly and overwraught. Bush's bursting, exultant style isunique and unprecedented, and, as is the way with originals,it's been a big influence on subsequent female singers. Notthat Bush appears to have noticed (indeed she likes to makeout she doesn't listen to much contemporary music). She'snon-committal when I reel out the roll-call of the indebted.These include Tori Amos (whose piano-based melodrama owes alot to Bush's early style), Sinead O'Connor, 'kooky' Canadiansinger-songwriters like Mary Margaret O'Hara and JaneSiberry, and even a few post-punk chanteuses (ex-SugarcubeBjork, Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins).

Bush has always loved to make an unusual voice evenmore unearthly, by revelling in studio treatments and multi-tracking herself into a disorientating schizo-choralepolyphony. On the new album's "Rubberband Girl", she letsloose a geyser of scat-vocalese mid-song, a sort of horn solofor the human voice, then spirals off into an eerie drone-chant roundelay. "A lot of those vocal experiments justhappen in the studio," she says. "But then a lot of the timesI'm writing in the studio, onto tape, as opposed to taking awritten song in with me."

From very early on, Bush made production an inseparablepart of composition. She's vigorously and flamboyantly seizedon the studio's possibilities for sound-sculpting.Surprisingly, given that she's one of the few female artiststo go so deeply into studio-mastery, she's done hardly anyproduction for other artists.

"I've had offers, but I've been too busy. I do love theidea of helping someone else to make a record, 'cos it's avery difficult process. The whole question of songs andsounds and which ones go together and which don't, itfascinates me. You have to use very strange language todescribe sounds to musicians or engineers, like 'cold' or'warm'. Sound's a bit like smell, in that it's hard todescribe without comparing it to something inappropriate.They say that smell is most closely connected to the memorycentre of the brain, and I've always been obsessed with thefact that you can just smell something and it'll take youright back. You can't even place where it comes from, but youjust know it's from someplace way back in your childhood.And in some ways, maybe music does the same thing."

Bush's interest in exploring the possibilities of thestudio-as-instrument, the importance she places on"chromatic" timbres and textures in music, makes her verymuch part of the British art-rock tradition. In particular,she has much in common with Brian Eno (his first band, RoxyMusic, was a childhood favourite of Bush's). Both arefascinated by what Eno regards as the most radical aspect ofrock, the timbres, textures and treatments that can't bescored with traditional notation, can only be gestured atfeebly with metaphor and simile. Eno too has pointed out theaffinities between smell and sound as sensory zones for whichwe have no verbal map.

As it happens, Bush has "a lot of respect" for Eno."I think he's had a very big influence on the music business.The album he did with David Byrne, "My Life In The Bush OfGhosts", that's been incredibly... revolutionary. A lot ofthe sample-based music that's happening now stems straightfrom that. Such a turning point in music, the whole use ofrepetition. It was a big influence on me too. It's a shamethat 'My Life In The Bush' was so under-rated at the time.But that's always the way: the innovators tend not to havesuch big hits. And then you get people who copy two or threestages down the line, who get huge hits and are hailed as thenew sound. "

Could this be a veiled allusion to Bush's own neglectedmistress-piece, "The Dreaming"? While far from a flop, the1982 album was sufficiently avant-garde to alienate some ofher audience, and it didn't spawn many chart-toppers.

"I had bit of a rough time with 'The Dreaming' but I'mnot surprised really. It's kind of a weird album. But it wasa very important period for me, I just wanted to do somethingthat meant something to me and wasn't at all commercial. Iwas happy with what we achieved, even though a lot of peopledidn't get it. It consolidated feelings in me about doingthings that felt right as opposed to doing things so they'dbe incredibly popular."

As well as containing her first concerted embrace ofworld music influences (like the didgeridu-driven, aboriginalsoundscape of the title track), "The Dreaming" was also thealbum on which Bush got to grips with sampling, in the formof the then expensive and rather exclusive Fairlight.Nowadays samplers are cheap and commonplace, and thesampladelic sorcery Bush trailblazed is part of the fabric ofmodern music, from hip hop to techno. Appropriately, Bushrecently found herself being 'sampled'. For their rave hit"Something Good", British techno unit The Utah Saints took aslice of vocal euphoria from her "Cloudbusting" hit (off 'TheHounds Of Love'), and modulated it into a swooning loop.Bush's mystic ecstasy ("I just know that something good isgoing to happen") was transformed to evoke the raver'sbreathless anticipation as the Ecstasy starts to come onstrong. Perhaps unaware of its full naughtiness, Bushapproved of the song, and with typical, almost thespianmodesty, says she was "flattered".

These days, of course, it's hip to declare that youalways liked Kate Bush. But when she started out, she wasvery much identified with progressive rock (Pink Floyd's DaveGilmour helped kickstart her career, and she's long been aclose friend with ex-Genesis art-rocker Peter Gabriel).While Bush's success dwarfed most of the punk bands,critically she suffered somewhat from punk's overhaul ofvalues, which decreed that social realism and raucousminimalism was where it was at, and Bush-style conceptualismand sonic maximalism was passe. For many, Bush was a bit ofa hippy chick, a throwback.

"It was one of those points in time when stuff was beingthrown up, and it was quite incongruous, me turning up at thesame time," she remembers. "At that time, there was a certainover-the-topness that needed to be expressed by a lot ofpeople. But I did like a lot of punk music at the time. Itan important period of music, it shook things up a bit."

Looking back, it's now possible to reappraise Bush asa sort of nicer, more palatable version of Siouxsie Sioux,the punk Ice Queen. They share a similar piercing, banshee-like vocal style, a similar delight in ransacking history'swardrobe for striking images, a similar blend of proto-feminist strength and feminine mystique. Unlike the rocktomboys (from Joan Jett to L7), who emulate cock-rockmastery, the likes of Bush and Siouxsie use mystery as aweapon. Like Stevie Nicks' Welsh witch "Rhiannon", theyelude and evade the male gaze, even as they enthrall it.

Which is why so many teenage girls in the late Seventiesand early Eighties fixated on Bush or Siouxsie (and sometimeseven both). With her interest in literary and mythologicalarchetypes of wild women, Bush connects with that part offemale experience that involves adventures in "the greatindoors". Where boys go wild in the streets, girls more oftenroam the wilderness of their imagination.

Talking to female friends, I discovered that Kate Bushhad much the same formative effect on them as someone likeJohnny Rotten/Lydon had on me. There are some parallelsbetween Bush and the ex-Pistol: the influence of a Catholicmother; the fact that Bush was a Pink Floyd protege, whilstRotten was wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt when he first met hissvengali Malcolm McLaren. Admittedly, Rotten had scrawled'I Hate..." on top in biro, but he must have liked themonce (his tastes in prog, glam and art-rock were otherwiseremarkably close to the young Bush's). There's even aparallel between Public Image Limited's experimental 1981album "Flowers Of Romance" and Bush's "The Dreaming": bothLydon and Bush messed around with a palatte of exotic, non-rock instruments, and there are remarkably similar storiesabout them devoting days to extracting strange percussivesounds by bashing together unlikely objects.

But what they really have in common is the originalityand sheer Englishness of their voices - Rotten's Dickensiansnarl, Bush's quivery stratospherics, were both defiantly un-American. So now that the punk versus prog wars have longsince faded, it's possible for a new Brit-and-proud-of-itband like Suede (current ringleaders of a 'Yanks go Home'anti-grunge backlash) to talk of loving the Pistols, KateBush and Bowie all in the same breath.

Bush doesn't respond too well to questions of gender,perhaps wary or plain bored of the 'women-in-rock' fix, butshe is very interested in androgyny (an Anglo-pop traditionrecently revived by Suede). In "Eat the Music", shecelebrates the fact that "not only women bleed". "It wasjust playing with the idea of opening people up, the idea ofthe femininity in a man that's hidden, and the man in awoman," she says. In fact, Bush believes that there's "aworld movement towards androgyny. Whether people areconsciously controlling it, or not, I do think it's what'shappening. The main thing I'm aware of is that the conceptof 'anima' and 'animus'" (she's referring to Carl Jung'sfemale and male archetypes) "has entered the publicimagination in quite a big way. Then there's the way peopleare dressing too. I think it's very positive. It's seemssuch a shame that men and women don't help each other, thatthey're always working against each other."

Back in 1978, Bush confessed that "when I'm at the pianowriting a song, I like to think I'm a man, not physically butin the areas that they explore." While this may simply be anindication of the extent to which Bush was venturing into afield - art-rock - almost totally barren of female rolemodels, it also suggests that pop is a space for androgyny,for playing with gender and transcending limits. A utopianspace.

"That's what all art's about - a sense of moving awayfrom boundaries that you can't, in real life. Like a danceris always trying to fly, really. To do something that's justnot possible. But you do as much as you can within thosephysical boundaries. All art is like that, a form ofexploration, of making up stories. Stories, film, sculpture,music: it's all make believe, really."

SIDE PANEL: THE FILM

The title of Kate Bush's new album is a tribute to thelate film-maker Michael Powell, who, in partnership withEmerick Pressburger, made "The Red Shoes" and other classicBritish movies like 'Black Narcissus', 'The Life and Death ofColonel Blimp', 'A Matter Of Life and Death' and 'PeepingTom'. Confusingly, Bush is making her directorial debut with'The Line, The Cross, The Curve', based on the same fairystory as "The Red Shoes".

"I'm a big fan of Michael Powell's films. They're justvery lovely - very sumptuous in their look, but very human aswell. There's this lovely sort of heart all the way throughhis stuff. I also think he had a really wonderful attitudeto women, they're always portrayed as women AND as people. Iwas very lucky in that I got to meet him just before he died,and he was such a lovely person. He left quite a bigimpression on me. My film is nothing like his film 'The RedShoes' really, but it's based on the same idea of these shoesthat have a life of their own, and if you're unfortunateenough to put them on, you're just going to dance and dance.It's almost like the idea that you're possessed by dance."

For 'The Line, The Cross, The Curve' Bush hooked up withtwo of her heroes, the dancer and mime Lindsay Kemp (withwhom she used to study with in her early days of popstardom), and actress Miranda Richardson (Oscar-nominatedstar of "The Crying Game"). "I just think she's one of thebest actresses we've got," gushes Bush. "I'm just so pleasedshe got involved."

The hour long film was made with amazing swiftness. "Itwas written and rehearsed in a couple of months, and tookthree weeks to film - we should really have had twice aslong. It's been hard work, but really interesting for me,really educational. For years I've been saying to friends,'oh, I'd love to make a film', but I hadn't really planned ondoing a film like this, one that's partly based around tracksfrom the album. I would like a shot at making a proper filmone day. See, I'm not really sure if there's a a lot ofopportunities to show short films like 'The Line, The Cross,The Curve'. I've no idea where it will actually be shown, butit would nice for people to get to see it in its entirety.Just once!"

extracts from Fred Vermorel's piece (Village Voice/Voice Literary Supplement, October - November 2000) on his approach to renegade biography Fantastic Voyeur:Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography

"There was a metal fire escape up one side of her house. At the top was a black emergency door with a bar, the kind you find in cinemas. Such doors could be jimmied open. But was it alarmed? I often climbed to the landing outside this door and made a nest, camping on the iron slats. Sometimes her cats passed below and looked up at me. Would they tell? Sometimes she passed below, wheeling her bicycle for nocturnal sorties. Squatting there, refreshing myself with sandwiches and tea from a flask, I would listen to her dwelling as a lover sprawled over her body, detecting her heart."....

.... "There is also a sensuous and flirtatious aspect to biographical research: breaking seals and confidences, untying ribbons from bundles of documents, raising the dust of strangers' lives, dealing and unpacking other people's intimacies, deciphering their photos . . ."

.... "Sometimes I pressed my ear to the door and heard distant comings and goings. The gist of events and conversations, uncertain threads and emissions of her and her brother's lives. Explosions of hoohas, pounded stairs, slammed doors, flushing cisterns, music. It was as if they were putting it on to fascinate and tease me. Listen here, Fred! What is this noise here? And that one?"...

"All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping. I adopted the persona of a mad professor so obsessed that he traces Kate Bush's genealogy back to the Vikings. And I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. Oddly (or perhaps not), the book became the bestselling bio of that singer. But what most struck me was how straight were the readings people made of this text. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether "I" was "really" obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.

Far from running over her cat, I seduced both her cats, Zoodle and Pywacket. I'd watch her let them out the door at night and coo them over to my hiding place, where I'd stroke their grumbling fur. Her cats were my Trojan horses to carry the smell of the hand I caressed them with back into her house, into her very lap. "

... "The morning John Lennon was shot I woke suddenly around 4:15. Numbers were flashing through my head: a phone number. I jotted it down on a pad. Turned over but still couldn't sleep. Around seven I turned on the radio and heard the news. A few days later, out of curiosity I rang the number. Kate Bush answered."....